Shinji of the Ring
by Traitor of All Traitors
Summary: Fifteen years ago, nothing went the way some had desired, but more suffering had come out of the devastation. One such casualty is a young man with such disgust directed towards him from many that can't escape a dark part of his past that even he can't seem to see much hope in being accepted. His only light exists in a ring he received from a woman that never saw him as a monster.
1. Shinji of the Ring

Creation began on 07-19-16

Creation ended on 12-13-17

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Shinji of the Ring

A/N: Not a crossover, but only an aspect or two that would make it a crossover.

Ever since he could remember anything, Shinji knew that nobody really cared about him. In their eyes, he was nothing, a waste of space. But he found himself no longer caring about their opinions of him, which were nothing more than symptoms, extensions of what they thought of his parents, whom were nothing more than an annoyance to his conscious. He spent the last nine years of his life unconcerned with their views or fates. So even the discovery of a letter addressed to him from his father didn't lighten his mood.

Of course, his aunt and uncle wanted him gone, and his last words to them were, _"Be careful of what you say that you desire."_

This…was nearly a day ago, and he read in the newspaper that reported a family of three dying in a house fire; he knew it was them because they printed out the address of where they lived. But Shinji viewed their deaths with indifference; because he didn't matter to them as a person with feelings no different from those of any other child, they didn't matter to him as people, let alone relatives.

Throwing the papers aside, he returned his attention to the one thing in his life that made everything that happened to him pale in comparison to what he did feel that was worth feeling. On his left hand's ring finger, there was a gold ring engraved with strange markings. It seemed ordinary, maybe even like a cheap object, but Shinji viewed it as perhaps the most interesting thing to ever happen to him.

 _My precious,_ he thought as his train entered the station in Tokyo-2. _You're among the only good things that have ever happened to me since that day I found you._

Stepping out of the station, the fourteen-year-old boy shielded his eyes from the sunlight; he had been in the shaded parts of the train cars for over three hours because he wanted to read a digital novel that caught his attention a year ago on his tablet. It wasn't just that, but he had a dislike for the afternoon sunshine ever since he suffered from a childhood incident where his cousin threw vinegar in his eyes and his aunt and uncle did nothing about it.

 _There's only one thing back there that even matters to me,_ he thought as his eyes adjusted to the brightness. _The only place that became my home, even though it originally belonged to an elder that accepted me for me, despite the fact that everyone else despised me._

He reached into his left pocket and pulled out his wallet, opening it up and looking at a picture of a woman in her seventies with an aura of tolerance on her face as she sat beside a younger Shinji on the pavement path leading to a small house. It was one of the better times he had in his past and the only time he ever felt happy to be around someone that didn't despise him simply because of who his parents were.

A soft breeze swept past him as he walked down the street. Then, he stopped and looked down the street, seeing a blue car speeding towards him.

The car stopped in front of him…but Shinji displayed some degree of anger towards the driver of the car, as he stomped his right foot on the bumper, which then fell off.

"Hey!" A woman's voice yelled from within the car. "What's the big idea?!"

"Your lack of punctuality, your indecency, and the fact that you work for a disgrace. Is there any other reason beyond those?" He asked, holding up the picture she had sent him to identify herself as the one picking him up.

"You're Shinji Ikari, no doubt about that."

"Don't call me Ikari. It might be the family name of my mother, but it's no different from that has-been she chose as well as herself: Dead weight."

The woman got out of the car and got a better look at the fourteen-year-old boy, seeing that he appeared vastly different than she was initially told. There was something about him that seemed…bitter…detached from the rest of the world. It was like something happened to him that was so terrible that he developed poor social skills and a cold outlook as a consequence.

-x-

"…Understood," went an elderly man as he hung up a phone on a bridge. "That was Captain Katsuragi. She has picked up the boy."

"Excellent," a man with orange-tinted glasses and white gloves responded.

"However, she did explain that he wasn't as she was told to expect."

"It's irrelevant. Just make sure he's brought here."

-x-

It wasn't just the fact that he slammed her bumper off and called her out on her punctuality and sensuality, it was the crazy sense Misato had that the drive to NERV HQ was anything but a simple, quiet one. She looked at Shinji and noticed the ring on his finger.

"Um…are you married?" She decided to ask him.

"Yeah," he answered her, "to my hatred."

"Then what's with the ring?"

"It's precious to me, one of the few mementos I have of her."

-x-

"Wait a minute, is this accurate? Who in their last will and testament leaves all they have to a kid they barely know that an entire town despises?" Gendo questions, reading his son's background file.

"Apparently, the elderly woman your son would spend his days and nights with when he couldn't or wouldn't go back to your in-laws," the elderly man told him, reading his share of the file. "It says here that Ms. Serizawa was one of only three people that never gave Shinji a hard time growing up. Spoke with her lawyer and made sure that Shinji got all that she had when she died. Probably explains why his file says that he up and left his in-laws' house to live in hers almost three years ago…provided that a weekly checkup was met."

"And they just let him live there alone?"

"Ikari, don't forget that ten years ago, you left him alone with them after that incident that scarred over two-thousand people, eight-hundred of whom lived in Japan and were disgusted with the Ikari family, meaning your son is a victim simply because he's your son. How do you think his life has been since then?"

Gendo chose to deny any involvement he had during that time, since nothing that was supposed to happen fifteen years ago had happened at all. At least not in any way that was desired.

-x-

"You got some ink?" Misato asked Shinji, noticing some black marking on the side of the boy's neck as they rode the linear elevator into the Geo-Front.

Shinji's eyes widened and he pulled up his shirt's collar to cover the marking.

"I don't want to talk about it," he responded, sounding angry about it, not at all embarrassed. "Don't ask me about it again."

She was starting to wonder just what had happened to this boy that made him so…disgruntled and defensive towards everyone. Even just a curious question about whether or not he had a tattoo was a no-no.

"You don't like talking at all, do you?" She asked him.

"My past is not for discussion," he responded.

-x-

Rising from the oceans and being assaulted by the likes of creature lesser than itself, a creature that was one of many that swore revenge for the unforgivable atrocity that was done to them over ten years ago. Their puny weapons were completely useless against it.

BLAST! It fired upon them and unleashed its divine fury, sending these disgraces into the next world where they belonged.

-x-

"…Is this him?" Ritsuko Akagi, a faux-blond-haired woman in her early-thirties, asked Misato as she stood in front of the purple-haired woman and the fourteen-year-old boy that seemed completely put off by everything and everyone.

"Uh, yeah," Misato answered her. "He's, uh… Well, I really don't know what to say about him. He hasn't been very…talkative."

"Ain't nothing to talk about that's worth talking about to anyone," said Shinji, really sounding like he'd rather be anyplace but where he was right now.

"Right. This way, please." Ritsuko responded, leading them to Gendo's office.

-x-

"…How can you be certain that he'll even comply with us, Ikari?" Fuyutsuki asked Gendo. "He could just walk away out of spite towards you."

"He won't have a choice," Gendo answered, confident that his son would provide his services to the agency.

The door to the office slid open and three people, two women and a boy, entered.

"Here he is, sir," Ritsuko uttered, and Shinji walked past her to the desk Gendo sat behind.

"You look well," Gendo told him, though he didn't respond to the comment.

Shinji lowered his upper body until his hands were on the desk and he was staring at his father with eyes that seemed full of malice.

"What the Hell do you want, old man?" He demanded.

"Your help," his father explained, cryptically.

"My help? You want my help? If I had any sense left in what passes for whatever it is you call it that is supposed to deal with the sense of consciousness, I'd laugh at what you're displaying right now. Unfortunately, I seemed to have lost much of that and more before I was even old enough to talk, so I'll just say what needs to be said, and my answer is fuck off."

Misato, Ritsuko and Fuyutsuki were stunned to hear the boy say this to his father, and then watched as he turned to walk away.

"You have some nerve to want my help," he continued. "Help with what, exactly? I'm not exactly the type one just walks up to, if they can even walk at all, and demands assistance. You call me out of the black and white, not so much as an explanation for why, and tell me to come here…and then spring your bullshit on me? Why would I even help you with anything?"

"Don't you dare walk away from me!" Gendo shouted at him, but Shinji just kept walking.

"Or what? What, what are you going to do? Hurt me? I'm pretty sure you and your buried squeeze did that a long time ago."

Misato stopped him by grabbing his left arm.

"You need to stop and listen to the situation," she told him.

Grip! Shinji grabbed her left arm and threw her to the ground, watching as she slid across to Gendo's desk.

"Don't ever touch me again," he warned her, and then returned his gaze to his father. "If you want to label me something, then go ahead. I have seventeen labels to my name, and they're all the same degree of bad. If you have a problem, man up and resolve it yourself. If you can't do that, then just sit back and face the consequences, whatever they might be."

"But you don't know what the problem we're dealing with is," Ritsuko told him.

"If taking care of your problem is the only reason that…that and its in-laws wanted me to come all the way out here, then maybe it's a problem I shouldn't even concern myself with. Oh, wait, I don't concern myself with the concerns of other people at all. I'm a loner, an outcast…and the day that anyone turns to an outcast is the day before Hell freezes over Earth and the day after nevermore. Nevermore."

He walked out the room and the door slid closed.

"With all due respect, Commander Ikari," said Misato as she got up, "why exactly did you want him here if he was just going to say no?"

 _He's worse than I thought he'd be after so many years,_ thought Fuyutsuki, never expecting Shinji to be so…damaged by what happened to him.

-x-

Within the elevator, Shinji waited patiently for his stop within the building to be reached so that he could leave this forsaken place. His first reunion with his father…and it ended exactly as he knew it would; no feelings of regret, no feelings of joy, not even words unspoken that should've been shared. If there was any evaluation to the point of understanding their relationship, it would be that there was no relationship between father and son.

 _What a ridiculous load of bull,_ Shinji thought, looking down at the ring on his finger. _He wants my help for a problem of his? I'd rather rot my insides than have anything more to do with him or the rest of the family. I washed my hands of the Ikari name too long ago to feel any devotion or sense of belonging._

Ding! The elevator reached his destination and opened up, revealing a group of men in uniforms…with guns raised at him.

 _What the Hell in this?_ Shinji wondered, his vacant expression unchanged by the sight of such intimidation and fear.

"Come with us quietly, freak show," said one of them to Shinji.

His face didn't show it, but his hands balled into fists at that designation; every time someone, anyone, called him something that, in one way or another, related all the way back to his parents, Shinji…just had a tendency to lose it bad.

-x-

"…We may have to reconfigure Unit-01 for Rei all over again," went Ritsuko to Gendo.

"Not yet," he responded. "This is simple reaction from one that is cornered."

"He didn't seem cornered, Commander Ikari," Misato spoke her mind about his son. "He was angry at you and clearly wants nothing to do with you or NERV."

"And we're to assume that this has nothing to do with the fact that he threw you across the floor like you were nothing but a ball of crumpled paper?" Fuyutsuki questioned.

"That…and he didn't want to talk about that tattoo he has."

"Tat…tattoo?"

"On his neck. Now that I think about it, I think it was also on his arms, too."

Hearing that made the sub-commander curious as to what else was new about the boy.

Ring-ring! Gendo's desk phone rang, and said man picked up.

"Yes?" He asked.

-x-

"…Aaaaurgh!" Shinji yelled, throwing two more guards out of his way, frightening many of the personnel that witnessed his violent reactions to the security detail that came to escort him back to his father's office. "Aaaurgh!"

He grabbed one guard that had already been slammed against a wall with enough force to knock him out and threw him at four other guards. Two more came at him, but he grabbed both by their heads and slammed them into each other three times before throwing them backwards from each other. During the whole thing, his shirt had been ripped off, revealing a horrible series of black ink all over his torso and upper shoulders, resembling scars, skulls and a single-horned demon with red eyes feasting on a heart on his back.

Misato, Ritsuko and Fuyutsuki arrived and saw the carnage the boy was unleashing on the guards, half of them already half-dead and the rest about to buy the lot for crossing him.

"Damn freak!" A man groaned, pulling out a pistol and aiming for Shinji, who heard him and approached him, reacting faster than the adult had. "Aaah!"

Shinji had crushed his right wrist and grabbed his neck, beginning to strangle the life out of him.

"No, Shinji!" Misato yelled at him as she came over, trying to get him to let go of the man. "Shinji, stop! You're going to kill him! Stop!"

Shinji let go of the man, but then turned his sights on Misato!

"Aaurgh (he hit her in the left shoulder)! Urgh (followed by a blow to her stomach)! Haaurgh (which was then ended with a back-handed smack across her face, sending her to the floor)!"

When all the guards were incapacitated and nobody else tried to make a move on him, Shinji seemed calm and looked at the people that hadn't said anything to him…but made their reactions to him enough with their facial expressions.

 _They never stop,_ he thought, seeing their outright disgust and resentment towards him. _They keep staring at me! Like I'm some sort of monster! I'm not a monster! I didn't ask to be like this!_

Looking down at the floor for his shirt, he picked it up and put it back on, despite it being stained with blood…and walked towards the entrance of the building, just wanting to go back home.

Misato, despite the unexpected beating she received from Shinji, got back up and found it hard to believe that he was capable of such brutality.

"Hard to believe that he's that man's son," she heard a woman say.

"More like was his son," added a man. "He's more dangerous than the Angels are supposed to be, and he looks like a kid."

 _What the Hell happened to him?_ Misato wondered.

-x-

Sometimes, he felt sleepy after exerting himself against someone that caused him problems that led to physical force. Sometimes, he felt like he was going to blackout and wake up somewhere else in a dumpster or in a ditch that was filled people's waste for him to choke to death on. And sometimes, just sometimes, Shinji felt less and less like he usually did and more hollow and devoid of whatever was left inside him. As he walked down the street, he was feeling all of the above with all three and looked down at his right arm.

The markings on his shoulder started extending to his wrist, ending in two claws and a skull; now he would have to switch to long-sleeve shirts. And just like before, the tattoo felt like someone was searing his flesh…and had stitched his mouth closed to keep him from screaming, not that anyone would have done anything if they heard him.

And then…he fell onto the ground.

-x-

"…Everyone is concerned that it was a mistake to have him come here, Ikari," Fuyutsuki told Gendo later. "Personally, I don't blame them. You didn't see what they saw."

"Irrelevant," Gendo responded, and then the alarms went off. "Where is he?"

"He left…and then disappeared."

"Disappeared?"

"Nobody went looking for him after he left after beating up the security detail that went to keep him from leaving, as well as the abuse he laid down on Captain Katsuragi when she tried to keep him from killing one of the guards."

With signs that the Angel was nearing the city, Gendo realized that NERV had very options open to them.

"Prepare to launch Unit-01," he ordered.

-x-

Inside the Entry Plug, an injured albino girl with pale, blue hair and blood-red eyes, dressed in a white, skin-tight one-piece diving suit-like outfit with the sleeves missing to allow for bandages to cover her arms.

"Rei," the girl heard Commander Ikari's voice through the intercom, "our spare is unavailable. You must pilot again."

"Yes, sir," she responded, and the Evangelion she was inside activated.

-x-

The Angel arrived in the city after carving a path of death and destruction to get there, devastating every tank and attacking helicopter that was an obstacle in its way. And then, out of nowhere, it saw something that really set it off, rising from beyond the buildings away from it.

It reminded the creature of one of its own, but it reeked of the enemy, wrapped in shackles from top to bottom, with an ugly horn.

"Huuurgh," it snarled, expanding its muscle mass as it prepared to go against the new target that made a mockery of its race.

-x-

This was bad. Nobody inside Central Dogma could deny that much. The boy they had expected up and left after a bad reunion with his father, and they were left with sending an injured girl out in an artificial construct made from salvaged remains of a monster from fifteen years ago. It was anyone's guess as to what could happen next.

On the holographic screens, the Angel began to approach the Eva…and knocked it down onto the ground. Seconds afterwards, it raised its left leg up and began stomping on its waist.

"Status?" Misato demanded of Ritsuko.

"It's bad," the faux-blond responded. "The synchronization is dropping below forty percent."

"The pilot won't be able to take much more punishment from the Angel," a man added.

The Angel then ceased stomping the Eva and lifted it up by its head with its right arm, grabbing its right arm and began twisting and pulling at it.

Within the plug, Rei grimaced as the synchronization between herself and the Eva caused immense neural feedback. It felt like the Angel was going to literally rip her arm off.

CRACK-SPLIT! The Eva's arm, from the muscles to the very bone itself, separated under the pressure and sent a nerve-wracking sensation to the girl's brain.

"The right arm has sustained heavy damage," someone over the intercom informed.

Then, the Angel unleashed a different type of attack. A glowing spike of some sort extended from the back of its right arm…and functioned like a piston, driving the spike through the limb and against the Eva's head.

"Cranial casing is compromised!" More voices yelled over the intercom.

"Quick! Abort the operation!" She heard Captain Katsuragi's voice. "Pilot safety is our priority! Eject the Entry Plug!"

CRACK! The spike shot straight through the Eva's head, sending it flying backwards into an armored building, and a rush of blood sprayed out of its impalement.

For Rei, it felt like she had just lost an eye…and received a major concussion.

But for the Angel, it wasn't enough. It was nowhere near enough. Not until the Eva was in pieces, scattered around the place.

-x-

The extent of the Eva's cranial damage was unknown, and so was the status of the pilot, leaving Central Dogma with no clue as to whether the girl was dead or alive.

Misato couldn't believe this was happening right now. She would've settled for all of this to be nothing more than a bad dream (maybe then, she'd be able to live down her being thrown aside and beat down by Shinji in front of everyone that witnessed it), even just an hallucination as a result of her horrid experience from fifteen years ago. Anything to ensure that they were going to survive this onslaught.

CLANG-CLANG-CLANG! The alarms went off again.

"Oh, no! We have another blue pattern detected!" A woman announced. "What the…"

"Another Angel?" Misato asked.

"No… It's registering as…as human."

A blast of light several blocks away from where the Eva and Angel were occurred, sending streaks of electrical discharges into the air.

"What is that?" Misato questioned.

Something from within the light emerged, resembling an Evangelion, but glowing like the light it emitted, almost as though it were purely organic, almost featureless, with the sole exception of one feature that clearly set it apart from an Eva: It looked as though it had strands of hair on its head, like a mop or shaggy beast.

"Huuuuaaaargh!" It roared an inhuman roar as it moved around the street it was on.

"Are you sure that's not an Angel?" Misato asked; if it wasn't the fact that it looked like an aberration of what she saw fifteen years ago, it was the fact that it brought up very painful memories of the experience that, while not as devastating to the rest of the world, was still very brutal to varying degrees.

"It's not registering as an Angel," the man said. "It keeps showing as human."

-x-

The Angel looked at this new creature and felt immediately repulsed by the sight of it. It bore a greater resemblance to one of its own, but with the exception of the hair on its head making it another perversion.

"Aaaaaurgh!" The creature roared again, approaching the Angel.

The Angel responded by unleashing its energy beam attack, but it did absolutely nothing to impede the creature, which reacted with ferocity as it tackled the Angel to the ground and began to beat it with its bare hands.

-x-

"…It's…attacking the Angel," went Misato, confused by this creature's behavior.

"Whoa," some of the lower personnel reacted as they saw the creature pounding away at the red sphere on the Angel, cracking its surface.

"Iiiiiiieee!" The Angel shrieked, wrapping itself around the creature that perverted one of its own and igniting its core.

"It's going to self-destruct!" Misato gasps.

FLASH-BOOM! The Angel exploded, blanketing the entire city in light, obscuring everything.

Everyone had to shield their eyes from the intensity of the light.

Beep. An alert came, and a technician responded to it.

"We have a signal from Unit-01," the man informed them.

As the light faded, there was no trace of the Angel…or the other creature that attacked it.

"It was some kind of human…and it looked like the First Angel," sighed Misato; she wasn't sure whether to loathe this unknown factor in this phenomenon or tolerate it because of her personal experience with the First Angel.

-x-

With the sole exceptions being the street where the Angel self-destructed and the two buildings the Eva damaged, Tokyo-3 was relatively intact, allowing for people to return to their homes in an orderly fashion. But hardly a soul felt safe in a city that had become a war zone and wanted to relocate to a safer place…and after a chance discovery was made in an alleyway three hours after two civilian women had decided to cut through four blocks after returning to their building from the shelters.

-x-

Although NERV insisted (really just on Gendo Ikari's orders) on taking care of the situation, Tokyo-3 Memorial Hospital saw a problem in letting the paramilitary agency take custody of the their new patient.

Shinji Ikari, against most odds with people mainly avoiding him at every chance they got, was currently in a deep sleep after being sedated for the physicians to examine him for what they had initially believed to be scar tissue damage on his torso and upper arms. When the markings on him were deduced to be a form of tattoo, one female nurse had noted that they were anything but what they seemed to be at first glance. A sliver of skin on his back had been surgically removed at the nape…and the missing sliver regenerated, ink-like pigmentation and all.

"He was found in an alley?" Misato asked one of the doctors outside the room the boy was recuperating in.

"That's what the two women that found him claim," he stated. "He was half-naked, bleeding from his back from two lacerations, muttering something about not belonging anywhere."

"Any indication that he was assaulted?"

"Unless the assailant was some sort of ghost of a samurai or monster the size of a man that specializes in torture methods that don't leave marks. The lacerations on his back were concluded as being due to the skin being frail for a brief time."

"What about self-inflicted injuries?"

"Whatever those markings on his skin are, they're an injury enough. Almost thought he was going to come to during the time we were patching him up when a nurse tried to remove that ring on his finger."

"The ring on his finger?"

"He clenched his hand tightly and we couldn't remove the ring without removing the finger. The right hand was completely limp, though."

-x-

"…So, NERV has absolutely no clue as to what that thing was that did what the Eva failed to do?" SEELE 06 asked Gendo during their meeting to discuss the aftermath of the Angel attack. "We're to understand that it resembled the First Angel to an uncanny degree?"

"Almost, but it possessed an aspect the First Angel lacked: It seemed to possess hair," Gendo explained. "It also registered as human."

The council was silent.

"Ludicrous!" SEELE 12 shouted.

"No way in a billion years could any Angel possess human DNA!" SEELE 03 added. "The chances of this ever happening are astronomical!"

"Silence!" SEELE 01 shouted, and the council was quiet. "However this creature came to be, it is imperative that we ascertain whether or not if it will appear again."

"The Angel that attacked self-destructed…and the other creature disappeared, assumed to be dead," Gendo informed them.

"And if it was exactly like the First Angel, I doubt you'll not see it again," SEELE 09 told him, "and we're to understand that you tried to recruit your own son to pilot the Eva?"

"Time, money and manpower," said SEELE 02. "Exactly how much of these must be wasted by your family, Ikari?"

"And he refused you out of spite and left," added SEELE 11. "There's hardly a soul left alive that doesn't remember what happened back then."

"That has nothing to do with this discussion," Gendo told them. "The boy will pilot the Eva."

"For your sake, he had better, Ikari," SEELE 01 had warned him. "Otherwise, he will be considered a lost cause and a waste of time and resources. It's not just the matter with the Angels. What of the Instrumentality Project? To us, it represents our true salvation in these times of desperation, and we will not allow this war with the Angels delay it!"

-x-

Narrowly escaping a horrid nightmare of being assaulted by opening his eyes, Shinji found himself under a ceiling that wasn't the one knew most or wanted to be under. Straining as he rose up, he felt like his insides had been burned up and left to decay over a short period, and saw that he seemed to be in a medical room. Medical attention hadn't helped him before, and he saw no reason for it to help him now.

Getting out of the bed, he saw that his markings had spread to the backs of his hands during the time he was out cold, but at least he still had the ring on his finger.

 _I'm getting out of here,_ he thought as he found his clothes had been replaced with medical garments. _I refuse to be reduced to some lab rat._

-x-

"…The fact that they refused to relinquish their custody of the Third Child only adds more to the lack of credibility NERV has over the situation," said Ritsuko to Gendo that evening in his office. "What's worse is that four of the medical personnel there were from whatever happened ten years ago…and supported the hospital's refusal to hand him over."

"Irrelevant," went Gendo, displeased over this. "The Third Child must be kept in check until the Angels have all been dealt with."

"He never piloted the Eva, so we don't know if he even could pilot it, given his current state, physical and mental."

Gendo was not concerned; there was no doubt the Eva wouldn't accept him.

The door to his office slid open and Fuyutsuki and Misato entered.

"We just got word from the hospital," Misato informed them. "The last time anyone bothered to look, the Third Child up and checked out before he was declared fit to leave."

-x-

No pocket change, no train ticket, not even a map of where this road led, but Shinji had something that compensated for his lack of resources: He had his desperation…and just so happened to come across someone's motorcycle. All he wanted to do was get back to the one place that felt like home to him, and Tokyo-3, Tokyo-2, not even the original Tokyo itself, was anything but home.

The line between a place of solitude and one of suffering was defined only by how the person inside them felt. In a place of solitude, Shinji would feel safe to a degree. Anywhere else, he wouldn't feel safe at all…or wanted for him.

 _I don't ever want to go back to that wretched city or those people,_ he thought as the night grew colder on the highway to his skin.

To be continued…

A/N: To clarify, the inspiration for this story came from the _Naruto_ and _The Lord of the Rings_ franchises. Basically, this incarnation of Shinji suffers from a similar situation like Naruto, but takes value in a ring in a similar fashion to everyone that became obsessed with the One Ring of Sauron, but only as a memento, not as an object of power. I'm going to wait a while before I return to work on this, but it might get some additional inspiration from _Akira_.


	2. Solitude

Creation began on 01-21-18

Creation ended on 06-26-19

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Shinji of the Ring: Solitude

It was a long and agonizing night, but the end result was worth it. The journey from Tokyo-3 to this small town that wasn't welcoming, quiet and as dark as the streets were under the fluorescent streetlights that barely seeded the neighborhoods. Several gated homes with large yards blanketed the upper streets…and there was only one with a motorcycle lying against the sidewalk in front of it. This was the house that Shinji saw as his home, as it was the only place that felt most welcoming.

Reaching for the door, he pulled it open and staggered inside before closing it.

"I'm home," he uttered, locking the locks and going upstairs to his room.

-x-

"Yeah, he would likely go back there," said Ritsuko to Gendo, ascertaining the possible whereabouts of the Third Child in his office. "It's the only place he'd likely refer to as his home."

Gendo would have to send Section Two agents to the town his son resided in and bring the boy back.

"Sir, if I may, why should we go through so much trouble over someone that wants nothing to do with what we're doing here? He rejected what he was informed of and walked away just as the Angel arrived…and nearly killed a man that was about to kill him."

"It is imperative that he be brought back to pilot the Eva. I will use any means necessary to make him do as he's told."

"And should he continue to refuse…or does something completely unexpected?"

Gendo didn't answer her; he honestly had no worries about Shinji doing anything unexpected.

-x-

"…So, she died in her sleep, too?" A man asked in the shadows to a woman beside him.

"Yes," she answered him. "She's the third one to pass away this year. Nine years old…and she never knew why they did what they did to her."

"Too many of us are dying because of the sins of the people that turned us…and we're only able to slow the transition down by maybe a few days or weeks to even just a few short years. I can live without a future for myself, but to watch each of you go before you even get to live lives of your own is a weight on my conscience that will condemn me to Hell."

"On a lighter note, we found another child of similar trauma to the others we found over the years."

She slid over a file and he looked down at it, seeing the picture of the young boy that had a look of solemn grim to him.

"Shinji Ikari? How can we be sure about him?" He asked her. "His father ditched him when he was just a toddler."

"Because I was in Tokyo-3 when he showed up," she explained, "and I saw what the extent of what was done to him resulted in."

The man in the dark looked at her and wanted to know what she saw. The only answer she could give him was as odd as it was frightening: Light infused with anger.

-x-

Shinji awoke to find the sun out…and that he was back in his room.

 _Was it all a dream?_ He wondered, trying to wrap his head around a crazy dream he had about light and fire. _A tower of light… A tower of water… Fiery rage… I can't remember anything after leaving that place after I hit that woman._

He got out of bed and went to the bathroom to shower; he might've lived alone, but he respected Hitomi's home to never retain any dirt he might've accumulated during the day. His chest and shoulders felt achy, like his skin had dried up completely and was cracking each time he moved. As he shed the ripped garments and got under the cascading hot water, he twitched from the discomfort it caused his nerves. Closing his eyes, he let the water wash over his back.

Slump! Something fell to his feet from off his back.

He opened his eyes and looked down, seeing a horrid sight. The wet skin that had been on him had washed off onto the shower floor, followed by other areas of his skin that were now wet. But the strangest thing was that he wasn't in any pain from this happening…and in place where the skin had fallen off his left arm…was new skin, covered in blood that was being washed away, but free of the tattoo-like markings that had been on the previous layer of skin. Instead of seeing muscle and nerve tissue as the blood washed away, Shinji saw the new skin was as clean as a newborn's, but not as frail.

For the first time in a long time, the boy was actually not upset about anything that had happened to him. If he was shedding his old skin like how a snake or some other reptile could shed theirs, he decided to let nature take its course and grabbed a part of old skin on his chest as hard as he could…and pulled it off; he didn't even feel pain from such an act, and let the handful drop to his feet.

"Let the water wash away all my sins," he sighed as he reached behind himself and grabbed another handful of his old, tattooed skin, ripping it away. "Ah, it's been too long since hot water felt relaxing."

-x-

"…Yeah, there's indication that he's in the house," a member of Section Two reported to Commander Ikari as he and three other members sat in a black Sedan across the street from the house that was listed as the Third Child's residence. "Hard to believe that a kid like this lives in this house by himself or that a woman actually left it to him."

"For now, just make sure you keep an eye on the boy," Gendo ordered them.

That seemed easier said than done, as they didn't know what this kid was capable of. After hearing about how he beat up several of the NERV personnel, including Captain Katsuragi, several of Section Two were skeptical of dealing with Shinji Ikari, not wanting to risk provoking him.

-x-

Bagging up his old skin that piled up in the bathtub instead of dissolving, Shinji felt revitalized and like a whole-new person as he came out of the bathroom and put the bag of his old skin in the garbage bin in the kitchen.

 _I wonder if this is what it means to feel like a new person,_ he wondered as he went to his room afterward. _I actually feel like doing something instead of my usual routine. But what is there to do? I don't want to leave the house, I don't have to go shopping for anything, and I don't have anything scheduled for anything else._

He went over to a small bookcase on the right side of his room and looked at the small number of books that he never really looked at after getting them from a library that was just throwing them out. One such book was a small paperback with a title that read as _Looking for Home_ , which suddenly appealed to his need to do something different. Picking up that book, he walked over to his desk and sat down to read its first page after reading what was written on the back of the book. Amazingly, once he started, he actually found that he was enjoying the plot of the story.

 _That library threw away something worth treasuring,_ he thought, already at the fifth chapter. _I'd be looking for a home to call my own, too, if I couldn't stay here in a country that has people that would sooner condemn me than to leave me alone._

-x-

"…What's he doing so far?" Misato asked Ritsuko as they were watching on a monitor an infrared video of the Third Child inside his house in real time.

"He's in a small room, sitting at a desk," she answered her, "probably reading a book or magazine."

"I seriously don't believe we should bother with this kid. If he refuses again and we trouble him further, what are the chances that he snaps?"

"We can explain to him that as a paramilitary agency, we can violate his civil liberties."

"Yeah, and he'll probably kick our asses again. I think he wanted to kill me, you know."

"Why on Earth would he try to kill you?"

"Use your brain."

"We have a problem," one of the Section Two agents reported, as the monitor showed a thermal visual of the boy getting up and walking towards the back door of the house, holding a stick-like object in one of his hands. "He's vacating the premises."

"Where is he going?" Misato wondered, and the thermal video feed cut off.

"Hey, he's coming this way!" Another Section Two agent revealed over the radio. "Oh, God, that's a metal rod in his hands! What is he doing with a… Oh, no! No!"

The radio cut out, and Misato and Ritsuko looked at each other.

"You don't think that…" Misato tried to suggest, but couldn't.

"No, there's no way he'd know," Ritsuko explained. "It'd be impossible for him to realize that so suddenly. They were just monitoring him."

-x-

SMASH! Shinji, unable to hide his anger at the very prospect of being spied on by people, took his metal rod and bashed the sides and hood of the black Sedan with the Section Two agents inside, cowering from him.

"Aaaurgh!" He yelled, taking the rod and bashing the front window in. "Don't spy on me! Leave now! Leave! Don't come back!"

Then, hoping his warning message sank through, he returned back to his home, wanting to be left alone. Somehow, he just knew he was being watched by someone that had the means to violate his privacy. At first, he suspected it was his father, and hoped that he was right, just so that he could enforce his desire to be left alone after he left that horrid place. Looking at Hitomi's ring, he took comfort again in the memories he had of her accepting him as a person and not some outcast.

 _People need other people to survive, but people that purposely torture other people or abandon them or exploit them, they drive certain people to demand solitude. Only if they violate that desire to be left alone, that stirs up trouble. Father, you are trying to kick a hornet's nest that you have no business trying to kick…and you will get stung until it hurts to breathe._

To be continued…

A/N: There are too many things and not enough motivation to get through them, but in due time, they'll get worked on. Until further notice, this story will be put on hold until the motivation returns.


End file.
